


Emotional Baggage

by sullenhearts



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Homophobia, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 12:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11990061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullenhearts/pseuds/sullenhearts
Summary: The Five People Who Have Most Wounded Robert or, how he wears his heart





	Emotional Baggage

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for homophobia and a somewhat graphic description of violence, and descriptions of death
> 
> I also don't know if the farmhand Robert got off with ever had a name, so if he did I'm sorry. Here, he's Nick.

There are five things which Robert wishes everyone knew about. He wishes that he had a business card that he could hand out that detailed the traumatic events of his life. Then he wouldn’t have to talk about them, but people who cared enough would know. They would start from that advantage point. He could start on that footing. 

**Jack**

What could you say about a man like Jack? Robert had never felt he was good enough. He had seen Jack’s disappointed face a hundred times, but none had been so bad as the day with the farmhand. Jack’s face then haunted Robert’s dreams when he was sinking again. It made him want to scratch out his eyes. It made him want to scream. 

He could remember the room, his bedroom. God knows why he’d thought it was a good idea to take Nick up there, but he had. Lust, he supposed, had taken over. In his head, when he thinks about it, the room is white and cold, and the bed is in the middle, as if they’re on stage in some grotesque play, waiting for the father waiting in the wings to storm in. Of course Robert’s room didn’t really look like that. In reality it had been a mess, covered in posters of Jordan and Louise from Eternal. Memory plays tricks like that.

He can remember the sounds. The scuffles of their clothes rubbing together, their bodies shushing where they touched, the moans that escaped from their kisses into the other’s mouth. Robert didn’t know kissing could feel like that. Before then his experience had been limited to girls in his class who would let you use your tongue but then wiped their mouths afterwards and looked at you with disgust. Nick was older, nineteen or twenty, and he kissed like it was the best part of the whole thing. 

They could’ve been fine. Jack had been down in a far field, acres away from the house. He shouldn’t have been there. They could’ve been fine, if Robert had been listening for Jack’s tread on the stairs, if he’d even thought anyone might barge in. But he hadn’t been aware, so the first thing he knew was the door, the cold air, and the silence. 

And Jack, in the doorway, like the Hulk or something. Terrifying. Robert was nearly twice the age he had been then, and he could still feel the abject terror he’d felt then, could still feel the blood rushing to his face and to his hands and feet as the rest of him went cold. 

Nick got sacked. Robert got hit. Jack’s belt came off later that night in the kitchen, and as the others watched Robert had been hit so badly that the welts had wept and his t-shirt had stuck to his skin. He’d had to peel it off in the bathroom, trying not to wince with the pain. 

It wasn’t the first time Jack had hit him, but it was the first time Robert had felt like there was genuine hatred being the strikes. “There’s no queers in my house,” Jack snarled as he was wrapping the belt round his hand, and Robert pressed his lips together to stop himself from saying “There is, there are – look at me.”

When he’d heard Jack had died he’d felt – something. Ambivalent in the true sense of the word. He felt relief, released from the prison of Jack’s tyranny and disapproval. He felt sorrow for the fact that he’d never get to mend the broken relationship – or his broken heart. 

He wasn’t planning to go to the funeral until he was halfway there. Some kind of catharsis, to see them lower the old man into that gaping hole. 

**Sarah**

Robert, obviously, couldn’t remember his mother. She was a ghost, a presence, a void where something should have been and wasn’t. 

Sarah, though. Sarah had been all the mother he had ever needed. She was gentle, and kind, and she put herself in the middle of Jack and Robert more than once, defending him in a way that she didn’t have to. 

He had tried to tell her once, about the fact that he liked boys too. He still liked girls, so he knew he wasn’t gay – girls were mysterious and beautiful and he didn’t understand them. He had a crush on a girl in Year 11. She who was taller than him and smelt of CK One when he passed her in the corridor on the way to PE. She wouldn’t have even seen him, but he thought she was stunning. 

But then there was a boy just the year above Robert, a boy with messy hair and a wary look, and his jumper sleeves pulled over his hands. He walked around school with big headphones over his ears, beating a rhythm out on anything he passed. He smiled sometimes, a couple of times even at Robert. Robert felt like there was a spotlight on him when that happened, a light that said ‘You’re okay’. 

It wasn’t normal, was it? To have crushes on boys? Robert found a book in the school library which talked about how crushes were normal, a happy healthy part of puberty. But it wasn’t just a crush. It didn’t feel like just a crush. Robert would’ve kissed him, if he’d asked.

He tried to say this to Sarah. He tried to talk to her about it, but she was busy cooking at the time he chose, one eye on two saucepans on the stove and one on Victoria who was playing in front of the fire. She wasn’t listening, he could tell, even as he stuttered and stumbled over the words. 

It didn’t matter. She loved him, she would love him no matter what. He knew what Jack thought of gay people, he knew the disgusted way Jack would look if two people of the same sex kissed in a film or on the telly. He knew too that Sarah would protect him, if and when it came to it.

And then she was gone. And it was like a gaping hole in his chest, like a sacred heart on his torso, a wound that would never heal, a physical pain that always nagged at the back of him even when he later felt happy, was happy. 

He wished she had known Aaron. He wished they’d met; he liked to think they’d have been friends. He wished every day that she was around. He knew there’d have been ups and downs, of course. All the stuff that had happened with Andy would’ve tested her loyalty, and Robert couldn’t honestly say that she’d have picked his side. But at least she would’ve been there. Maybe he’d have messed up less. Maybe he could’ve been okay. 

**Katie**

He had loved her. In his own way, he had loved her. He had to admit, he was jealous of what she’d had with Andy. That careful, happy domesticity that they’d cultivated. They could’ve had a long and happy marriage. They should have had that. It was Robert’s fault they hadn’t, and he felt guilty about it every single day. When Andy was still around, just seeing his face had been like a sucker punch to Robert. He had envied them their relationship. It was a hundred things that he wanted and had never had. 

If he’d known that he was, in effect, luring her to her death, he’d have done something else. Of course he would. He wasn’t a monster. He hadn’t expected her to die when he pushed her. He’d done it in frustration, and all he remembered was her winded sigh and then the crack of the floorboards beneath her. He could hear himself shouting, and her scream, and then silence. He could see her still face in his nightmares, a face that he had both loved and hated at different points in his life. 

He missed her. That was the upshot. He missed her. 

**Chrissie**

If he’d ever met his match, it was Chrissie. They’d done some horrible things to each other, been utterly foul to each other. But there had been good times. High living, mostly – holidays, weekends away, fine food and better wine. She’d always been able to make him laugh, too. 

He hadn’t ever planned to come back to the village. He’d cut his ties with it after Jack’s death. He wasn’t in touch with Andy at all, and only heard from Victoria sporadically. Chrissie had been muttering about moving for ages. Robert had come home one day to find a bunch of house particulars on the dining table, the asking prices eyewateringly high. He’d flicked through them, and had felt his heart stop when he saw the words _Home Farm, Emmerdale_ on the front of one brochure. He didn’t expect them to actually move there. The whole thing felt like a dream until the day they actually moved in. 

Could they have made it work? Maybe. He had his head turned by Aaron, obviously, but he would have probably ended up cheating on her anyway. Being back in the village brought back old ghosts and old problems. It was easier to blame the village than blame himself for crap decisions. 

Chrissie had left scars because of the helicopter crash and because of the way she’d outed him. He found it difficult to forgive her for that. Yeah, everyone might’ve known eventually, but in his own way, with his own explanations. 

He found it difficult to talk to her, even now, but he remembered one time on a rooftop terrace in Malta. Chrissie was wearing a white bikini with gold buckles, and she was gorgeously tanned, and she’d had huge sunglasses that made her look a bit like an insect. She was reading some trashy novel but she put it down when Robert stepped out of the hotel room. She’d pulled her glasses down her nose to check him out in new, blue shorts. She’d whistled a low whistle, and had grinned up at him, and he’d bent down to kiss her softly. He remembered that time most of all. 

**Aaron**

There was still hope. Robert still had hope that they could work things out. He still wanted Aaron back, he still wanted to be someone’s husband and call Aaron his. He was still wearing his wedding ring. He’d taken it off one morning and left it on the bedside table, resting on the base of the lamp, but he’d felt naked without it all day. He didn’t realise how much he fiddled with it, turning it on his fingers with his thumb while he was on the phone, touching it with the thumb and forefinger when he stood up. He was still wearing and that meant, that to strangers, he still appeared to be a married man. 

But Aaron seemed determined that it was all over. Even if they had a chat, a bit of a laugh, Aaron’s face would close off at the end, like he remembered that this wasn’t allowed, that they were broken up now and that was that. He was moving on, he was making out to Robert like he was moving on with his life and that it didn’t feature Robert in it. 

Ninety percent of Robert wouldn’t accept that. They could still make it work. Even with the baby on the way, he was sure that if they just talked, they could talk it out, work it out. Move forward together. Go back to that happily married couple they’d been for all of ten minutes. Make new memories. Be happy. 

But ten percent thought that maybe this was it. Maybe Aaron would never forgive him. Maybe their marriage was over; maybe one day Robert would take off his wedding ring for good and store it away in a box. Maybe he wouldn’t even miss it. He didn’t know. He didn’t know what would happen with a future partner, either. He assumed there were women who would date bisexual men, he believed that they did exist, but he worried about it. He worried that he would always be trying to explain Aaron, and maybe even explain him away, and that wasn’t something he ever wanted to do. Aaron had meant so much, had brought so much to Robert’s life. Anyone who ever came afterwards needed to understand that, and needed to understand that there would always be a bit of his heart that belonged to Aaron Dingle.


End file.
